Global warming has been linked to greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide that in excess trap heat resulting in warming of the atmosphere. The excess has been linked to burning of coal that provides other environmental impacts and human health effects due to release of other gases such as Sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and other chemical products contributing to hazards such as acid rain and lung cancer.
Steps to mitigate these environmental hazards have been found by extracting natural gas such as methane that is released from coal beds. This release of methane has been found to result from coal degradation partly due to specific bacterial populations and enzymes. With the discovery that approximately 20% of natural gas is microbial in origin, identifying the specific microbial population that promotes degradation is critical, and has led to development of Microbial Enhanced Coal Bed Methane (MeCBM), which involves stimulating microorganisms to produce additional CBM from existing production wells.
Cost effective techniques to identify microbials have been found in DNA-sequencing. Not only has this technology been beneficial in isolating and identifying microbial communities for CBM studies, but has been applied in microbial ecology in deep waters evolutionary research.
Unfortunately, sampling subsurface microbial communities has been difficult due to studies relying solely on water and core samples to access or study the active subsurface microbial community. However, present Samplers that only acquire water do not adequately reflect the microbial densities and activities in the subsurface at selected locations. Microbials have been found to grow and attach to the subsurfaces found at the desired location and are less likely to be represented in sufficient numbers in mere water samples. Use of core samples are often prohibitively expensive to obtain, and difficult to collect in conditions similar to the desired environment. In instances, where the target area is a deep subsurface such as coal beds, the environment requires the core and water to be anaerobic, which is a costly process to achieve and to keep aseptic. Failure to duplicate the sample's environmental conditions including pressure, gas and temperature may change and destroy microbial attached to the core.